The only physics experiment that stands out in my mind was that which dealt with liquid nitrogen; might have been oxygen, I don't remember for sure. He did the obvious and dropped a fresh orange into the container and pulled out a solid ball which he shattered with a hammer. That was the first time I saw or heard of that phenomena, and I was duly impressed.
Science of any kind always interested me. I never took classes beyond the introductory ones because I was really bad when it came to math. The only reason I passed algebra was because I was a tteachers' aid for him in some other geometry class he taught. I guess he felt sorry for me. LOL
Part of my hydroculture operation included raising Tilapia (by another company) in our building. The water from the fish tanks is what was used to water our plants.
They used Liquid Nitrogen to flash freeze the fillets and we played with it sometimes.
Froze all kinds of things for a short time there, then the novelty of it wore off.
I had a hard time with algebra, but for some reason geometry came easily.
I think this is because I could visualize what the simple formulas represented.
After geometry came algebra II and I failed that miserably, hi hi.
You and I think alike when it comes to math. Geometry made sense to me until we got into proofs. Most of the class was spent proving theorems. We each were assigned one and given the task to come up with the proof. Our grades depended on our successful presentation to the class. The more you could prove, the better your grade. Did better there than in algebra because, just like you say, I could see what I was talking about. I never took any more math classes after those two which turned out to be a mistake. I might have been able to go into engineering if I could calculate abstractions better.
Ironically, I started out as a draftsman at McDonnell-Douglas Aircraft. Got advanced into the NASA division fairly quickly. But I did not stay with them for long.
I went to work for Sverdrup & Parcel Engineering Company as a draftsman, but I caught so many mistakes made by the engineers, they moved me into the engineering department. Over the course of a couple of years, and many engineers coming and going, plus a couple of bosses got shifted around, no one knew I was not just one of the engineers, and they began giving me more and more engineering work to do. Right before I left their employee, just from talking with one of my co-workers, they learned I did not have a degree in anything. Good thing I was already on my way out the door and had another job lined up out in the county.
Once again, I started at MRTC as a Draftsman, and within only a couple of months was moved up to become their Chief Alignment Draftsman, which was normally an engineering position. It's also the reason for my travels along the pipeline to order materials and make the drawings for repairs. Thus the Motorola Phone in my car, and many jet flights down to Landa Wascom and Landa Woodlawn gas fields. Although only a Draftsman, I was next in line to become the head of our department. I've already talked about what happened with that in previous messages.
Other than working in our family business when needed, for the rest of my life I've basically been self-employed.
Even so, I still took enough side jobs for employers driving OTR, but most of these were in conjunction with another business I was building up. I started driving OTR using our family business rigs, running down to Apoka Florida to bring back greens, and built up several stops on the way back. Then I drove ALD Inc. part-time, and hauled government loads for NA Van Lines in between ALDI runs. That's how I ended up amassing 1.8 million accident free miles before I said never again. Had too many close calls my last six months on the asphalt jungle. None of the other drivers believed I would quit when I did with only 200k more miles before I got the 35k bonus check. But then a third of that would have gone to Uncle Sam anyhow. Way too many front-wheel-drive cars were menacing the highways for me to stay out there any longer.
I was a technician at Motorola and achieved that mostly through a home study course of electronics. All I had to do was pass the technicians test given by the company. It turned out that test was way easier than the license test for ham radio. I tried college for a couple years and that didn't work out. Thus, I was in the workforce with no degree. Like yourself I was working with engineers for most of my career, but there always was an invisible line. They had the degree and I didn't. One manager wanted to promote me but said the fact that I didn't have a degree prevented it. All those educated people would revolt if they had to work for a non-degree type like myself. It didn't matter that I was otherwise qualified to do the job. I don't regret never going into management, but I do have some about not being given a lot of engineering assignments.
My last dozen years with the company were in the IT department where that missing degree didn't matter as much. Well, not until the end. Some of the IT department was spared from early retirement, but all those who remained had degrees. I can't complain too much about that. Since I did have 35 years of service with the company they let me "look for a job" for about a year even though my department disappeared., The timing was right because they offered a severance pay of two years worth of salary. I was among the last of 40,000 to get that offer. The price I paid, however, was to sign an agreement not to sue them for age discrimination. No brainer. I signed that waiver in a New York minute.
Sounds like me and the service. After losing 2/3 of our men, they gave us two options, go to Nam or go home with an ELS and 35k in cash. Hey, at 19 years old, 35k was more than the cost of a new house, heck yeah we all took it.
Other than our family business which is a lifelong occupation whether you want to be there or not, I never stayed for a company for more than five years, mainly because of my medical condition we talked about before.
I had a couple of opportunities after I turned around 45 years old, to go to work in IT as a programmer.
It was not what you think. No programming involved at all, that is what they called their package installers.
All I would have to do would be to go around to businesses and update their equipment or install the packages in new equipment another department installed.
For one company, it would have been mostly car dealers, and for the other mostly AG or IGA grocery stores and perhaps a few Rexall drug stores. I had friends who worked for both companies and they said it was easy as pie, if you could stand the bosses.
I did try something on my own for a very short time, after I got an old keypunch machine.
At that time, both Allen and Wicks computer organs used IBM punch cards for their settings.
Those paper punch cards wore out really fast, and most were of the perforated type where they punch out the holes to set the stops. The Wicks organ would do this for them, but was problematic.
I found a company who had nearly indestructible nylon IBM punch cards.
And since Saint Monica's church was just up the street from me, and had an Allen computer organ, I borrowed their cards a few at a time and made nylon ones for them to see how the organist like them. Turned out she loved them.
I talked to the Father and offered to do all the rest of them for them for only a buck each. He agreed.
The organist made a little chart she could fill-in for new cards they didn't have any of yet.
She sent me about two dozen of these little Xeroxed charts all filled in, which made it easy for me to make them the nylon cards. I also had my hot foil stamping machine, and since she gave each paper a title, I stamped the cards with that title. Little by little she sent all the nylon cards I already did for them to have the name put on them also.
I made a little chart like the one she made for me, and sent packets of ten of them to other churches I knew had those two style organs and ended up getting about 15 orders, but they all came from only 4 different churches. Never could get the other churches to even try one to see if they liked it or not.
Seems the computer companies came up with a way to memorize the settings using something similar to pre-sets which are already on most organs, but instead of only having six to eight pre-sets, they could now store 99 or more.
There went that little project, hi hi. Keypunch was basically already dead when I got the old used machine anyhow.
My big case of nylon punch cards did not go to waste though. I had a die stamp made to cut out a floral backing used on the rosettes for award ribbons I made on the hot foil press.
Most of my involvement with IT did not include programming. There were some requirements where somebody needed a macro for a special spreadsheet or a unique GUI to enter numbers into a database. But all the programs I dealt with in IT were written by somebody else. It was my job to maintain them or configure the software for a specific need. Desktop support was a big part of the job too as was installing new machines and software. I was in the middle of the Y2K scare and did a lot of software assurance testing for that. I also got involved with replacing all the Macs with Dell Windows workstations. Made a few web pages for documentation purposes as well. But, all the real programming experience I had was before I got into IT.
At one point they decided to simplify desktop support because it was consuming too much of our time. A standard disk image was made and distributed unattended over the network. Anybody with problems after that got 10-15 minutes of our time. If we could not fix the problem in that amount of time, the client was told to save all his important documents after which we installed a new image. That fixed just about every problem. LOL
One of the early computers for which I did some actual programming (a PDP 11, I think) used punched paper tape to load the program. We used an old TTY machine to make the tapes. If so much as one hole didn't get punched correctly the entire program crashed unceremoniously. There were various grades of paper for that punched tape and we tried them all. None really held up to the rigors of factory production. Then along came mylar tape. That stuff lasted forever. Unfortunately, the punch machines didn't. The mylar wore them out fairly quickly. Fortunately, magnet tape cassettes were becoming available at the time and we ultimately switched to that.
After cutting my teeth on the Apple I, then the Apple II and II+, I took my Apple II to work with me and began the process of writing more Basic Programs to do the daily tasks I wanted it to do.
It wasn't hard to move up to the Lisa system, since it ran most of my programs the way they were, but we also bought ready-made programs for a few other common office tasks.
It wasn't until we got that massive Wang VS System that I really saw all that an IT department did to make sure all of our package modules did what we needed them to do.
Wangs offices were only a few blocks from us, and since we were one of their customers, I could go and watch them work. Often sitting on a stool in a corner far away from them so I couldn't really see what they were doing. But the place was like a beehive, orders coming in, and programmers pounding out code to fill those orders.
After they got a program written, it had to be tested, fixed, tested again until it was right, then it had to go into a package and tested to make sure the package worked with the module it was written for. Once it got tested and approved, then an installer/programmer would take it to the company who needed it and install it on their machine.
Wang kept track of every customer, every module they had, and every add-on package in those modules.
And of course, they got a huge fee for nearly everything, hi hi.
But the thing here was, our Wang System ran perfectly all the time, even though they had it doing tons of work for other people too. This was long before the internet, so a Wang person was always coming in and out to fetch data and start new data running. Some of it could be done over the phone lines, but not much by the looks of it.
Computers were around for a long time, and Motorola was making CPU's for an equally long time, before the powers that be decided that maybe it would be a good idea to introduce them to the office workers and to manufacturing. Since we were making chips for Apple in those days it was only natural to see them as the computer of choice wherever the connection to a mainframe was overkill. There was a lot of excitement when Lisa was made available but I was unimpressed. The monitor screen was microscopic and the text was hard to see even for my young eyes. LOL They did fit well into a production line environment, however.
Stories about Wang support were legendary. There may have been some corners of the Motorola universe that used them, but we in the manufacturing arm never so much as saw one. By the time I got involved with IT Macs were out and PC's were in. Dell was decided upon largely for it's service agreement. If there was a hardware failure, they came out and replaced the computer, not the component part. It got to the point where we had a room full of dead PC's that would get swapped out for a pallet full of new machines. That was some sweetheart deal I'm sure. It might be one of the reasons I don't like Dell today. LOL
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I wish I had the kind of disposable income I had back when computers first came out.
Although the price of computers came way down, fast, inflation grew twice or three times as fast.
No matter what industry I was in, or what type of businesses I ran, income never kept up with inflation.
There is a price point on any product where if you go beyond that folks won't buy it anymore.
It doesn't matter that the cost of making it is four to five times higher, they simply won't pay a higher price.
And for many of us, we can't afford the grossly inflated higher prices of many necessities.
Advancement in PC technology and the availability of off-the-shelf programs is really what brought Wang down.
I shouldn't compare a small computer like LISA with a mainframe like the WANG VS, except when it came to support.
With the LISA, about the only thing we could do with it was by writing our own programs, except for the few bought programs designed for a specific task.
Although it wasn't cheap, anything we wanted the Wang to do, someone would come and sit down with us and listen to what we wanted it to do, how we wanted the output presented, and they would take that info and come back a day or two with a fully functioning program to do exactly what we asked, and usually in an easier way than we expected.
I know I mentioned this before, but because the folks at Wang were using a percentage of our computer for jobs that paid us. It actually came out cheaper to own the Wang than the LISA. Or put this way, we actually made a profit from it, and they handled all the work involved too.
If I had the money, and wasn't so friggin' old, I might have considered the offer my neighbor across the street made.
Besides him, we have a solar panel company here installing panels on roofs or on back lots.
They just came up with some new type of solar panel array that looks like a tile roof.
But they are very careful to pick only certain houses to make them their offer.
It boils down to the homeowner has no initial cost, but must lease his roof and access to it for twenty years.
He gets to use electric from it when he can, but is not allowed to install a storage device until some specific point is reached. Probably after they've recouped more than double their outlay for equipment and maintenance, or longer.
They have set up a few charging stations in large shopping center parking lots, but you have to pay to use them.
The price of computers and their ability to do more work dramatically outpaces the rise of inflation. Every 18 months, according to Moore's Law, technology capacity doubles. While inflation is on a gradual rise, it's not exponential. Keeping a business growing at or above the rate of inflation is nothing less than a miracle for the small businessman. I am amazed that so many small businesses exist with so little profit motive.
In spite of our government's insistence that coal is the fuel of the future, I'm guessing solar power and wind power will be providing most of our energy needs in the future. Some huge advances are being made in the solar cell industry. I never thought about installing panels to sell the output to a third party. I don't know what's going on with your power company but I like the sounds of it. LOL It seems like automobile companies too are investing in electric mobile transportation. That might explain some of the charging stations you see. Can't say I have seen many around here. Then again, I haven't look real close either.
I do agree that inflation rises at a fairly steady rate. But it is when you start using that percentage with higher priced goods vs income is where you see the drastic difference in major price jumps.
Folks who used to earn 150 bucks a week, back when cars were around 5 grand. If you use something like 3% inflation rate and apply it that way. The 150 buck salary only went up to 154.50, while the 5 grand car jumped to 5,150.
Keep going for a decade and salaries were only at around 200 bucks, but cars had jumped to 8 grand.
Your salary went up by 50 bucks, but the price of the car jumped by 3 grand.
I'm out to lunch on wind power. It would not be feasible without the government handouts as being profitable.
Water over the dam is free and fairly constant, so I still see hydroelectric as a better alternative to wind power.
The dams were already paid for, and if they upgraded the turbines to the quality used in wind turbines, I'm sure they would produce more power at a cheaper price. Unfortunately, the type of turbines they currently use are not very efficient, which is why so many have been abandoned. A steam plant produces more electricity using coal cheaper than free water over the dam, simply because they use higher quality turbines.
I do like solar cells, but the resources that go into building one has emissions problems also.
Same as electric cars. The car may not pollute, but the process of manufacturing the items to make the electric car pollute more than a gas car does in 7 to 10 years. So are they really better. Plus they need to be charged using power from plants that also pollute, although not as bad as they used to.
I've flown over large fields of solar cells, and pilots are told to steer clear of the reflected sunlight from them.
Just as birds get chopped up in wind farms, they get roasted going over solar farms. Especially if too many of those panels are tilted such as to produce a more concentrated combined beam of super hot light. Like magnifying glass on a bug.
Now if everyone who owned an electric car installed a solar carport for charging, they would come out way ahead in the power pollution game, but not so much in the manufacturing game.
The rate of inflation is fairly narrow and stable, but the absolute dollar amount is not for obvious reasons. That's why you see a lot of statistics saying they were adjusted for inflation. 2019 dollars are not the same as 1959 dollars. While the absolute dollar amount due to inflation increases in large chunks it is proportional. That's why inflation is stated in terms of percentage and not absolute dollars. Today the average salary is (let me guess) ten times that of what it was fifty years ago. Thus it's pretty normal to expect the dollar amount for inflation to increase by a factor of ten as well.
There are pros and cons to all the alternate energy sources. Hydroelectric might be the best thing since sliced bread, but not everybody happens to have a river with a dam handy. Same for solar cells. Some spots on earth are naturally more sunny than other spots.
Your comments about electric cars may be very true, but there are reasons other than carbon footprints to get off of fossil fuel. One would be that we are going to run out of them eventually.
My step-son landed a job paying 125k a year his first year out of college.
My step-daughter landed a job paying 300 dollars per hour while she was doing design work, but only 20 dollars an hour between projects if they had menial things or her to do, else she got no pay. Even so, she averaged over 85k a year.
With them paying kids this much, it's no wonder us older folks on SS are trying to survive on 700 bucks a month when the cost of everything keeps climbing so rapidly. After we pay for supplemental insurance and drug insurance we have less than 500 bucks a month to cover utilities, car insurance, and real estate taxes, much less eat or buy uncovered drugs.
True on the rivers. But steam plants are some of the most efficient and without the waste problem of nuclear plants.
When I worked for MRTC, every single year they had to prove they could supply the increase in demand over the next 20 years. As far as oil goes, I don't think we will run out in our grandchildren's lifetimes, and perhaps not in their grandchildren's lifetimes.
We have more oil reserves within our US borders, than all the OPEC nations combined did three decades ago. Which often made me wonder why we bought oil when we had so much. I realize now it has to do with our nations power structure over the rest of the world. We are using up their oil first, then everyone will be dependent on us for oil.
A good buddy of mine worked for Amaco and we talked about oil from time to time. He agreed with you in the sense that we have a lot of reserves, but there was very little cheap oil left in this country. Most of those reserves are in shale and need to be extracted using special (read that to mean expensive) methods. Not until the price per barrel came to $70 was it profitable to take advantage of our so called reserves. The entire Saudi region is floating on a lake of oil that merely needs to be pumped out of the ground. That is the oil which nobody knows how much is in reserve. I have a feeling the Arabs know but not the rest of the world. When that easy to extract sweet oil runs out, then you will be glad you are driving an electric car. LOL
I have much compassion for you and others who are in similar dire financial straits. We don't agree politically and I should not say too much in that regard. BUT, it is the intent and agenda of the current administration to increase that gap between the rich and the poor. Elimination of the middle class is a goal long favored by the Republicans in general. I can't say whether it is laudable or detestable, but I know of a few people like yourself. Living under those circumstances is not what I grew up to believe this country is all about. I don't know that we can do much other than vote the bastards out of office, assuming they will allow elections in the future.
This map takes a while to come and populate, but it shows where our oil and gas reserves are located.
It does not include that which can be obtained by fracking, but actual reserves of oil and gas. https://certmapper.cr.usgs.gov/data/ene ... rical.json
Trump tried to get the minimum SS checks raised to 1,200 dollars, and the Dems killed it. Raising the low end would not also raise the high end higher. The Dems wanted a straight percentage increase across the board so those who got the most would also get more, and it would have to include Illegal Aliens as well. They kill any worthwhile thing these days.
From what I can tell the map is current as of 2005 and it shows historical data, i.e., where drilling has taken place up to that time.
I stand corrected. Venezuela has the most oil.
2017 Proven reserves of the top ten countries in the world are as follows stated in millions of barrels:
The United States has 39 billion. Venezuela has 300 billion.
Theses are good guesses but nobody knows the exact number given that some countries do not allow audits. The best guess is we will run out in 50 years at the current usage rate.
The numbers I'm quoting are proven reserves. The ones in the link you gave are interesting but estimates of all the oil that might exist. Some of that possible oil is not easily extracted and in fact may not be usable. There may be a 500 year supply of oil under the earth's surface, but we are going to run out of the stuff we can get to easily a lot sooner.
